Higher Level AI For Home Inspectors

Your phone rings while you’re in an attic, your inbox is full of scheduling questions, and you still need to train new inspectors without burning your week. That’s where AI can actually help, but only if you use it for systems, not shortcuts.

We sit down with Beau Brown from C and H Inspections in Salt Lake City to get specific about higher-level AI for home inspectors. We dig into what it takes to build an AI receptionist that can answer real questions like pricing, services, and availability, check a calendar, and then escalate to a human fast. The trust piece matters: if callers feel tricked, you lose the lead, so we talk through disclosure, call flow, and why a “sales funnel” mindset beats a generic chatbot.

From there, we get into training and quality control. Bo breaks down how AI can turn your existing manuals and procedures into a structured training program, create quizzes from real inspection photos, and even review inspection reports to flag where your team drifts from your preferred defect language. We also talk tools, including why hallucinations happen, why ChatGPT can be confidently wrong, and why you should build workflows you can replicate on more than one model so you’re not stuck if a vendor changes or disappears.

If you want AI automation without AI slop, subscribe, share this with another inspector, and leave a review so more inspectors can find the show.

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

Transcript

Ian Robertson  
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, everyone. So today we have on Beau Brown from C&H Inspections out in Salt Lake City, Utah. How you doing, Beau?

Beau Brown  
Good. Happy to be here today.

Ian Robertson  
And I said that, right, it's Beau, right?

Beau Brown  
Yeah, it's Beau. I know it's B and then basically all the vowels, but it's pronounced "Bo."

Ian Robertson  
Nice. Well, it makes me think of that guy from the 90s. Bo knows football, Bo knows baseball. Maybe you're too young for that.

Beau Brown  
No, I know. I've heard it. I've heard the Bo knows thing. And then there's Bo Derek that was also in the 90s, yep, not a boy. When I was younger, I thought Bo Derek was a boy, and found out later that she wasn't.

Ian Robertson  
I see where the mistake comes from, though.

Beau Brown  
Yeah, I was named Beau. And I had never seen a picture of Bo Derek. And there were so many people in my life that were like, oh, you're named after a famous actor, not actress. Well, they may have said actress, but I was young, I never put two and two together. I was just hearing the name Beau, that's my name, Beau, and it wasn't until I was like, 12, I was like, oh, that's a girl.

Ian Robertson  
I've always thought of Beau as being a boy's name, so you're good in my book.

Beau Brown  
Cool.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah. Well, I was named Ian. Our parents loved to give us trauma when we were younger, so it was always Peein' Ian until I was in high school.

Beau Brown  
My parents thought they were doing me a favor by naming me Beau, but not spelling it B-O, which would be like body odor, and I'd get made fun of. Instead, they doomed me to being called "Bue." Yeah, everybody reads it "Bue." Is there a Bue here? It's me. 

Ian Robertson  
Well, now that we're through that awkward intro, welcome to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We're really happy to have you on. And you actually reached out to us, and I really do appreciate that. And judging from your setup, it sounds like you do a lot of media production. You have a nice studio behind you and everything, so we appreciate you being on, but you're going to talk to us today a little bit about higher level use of AI as home inspectors. So everybody listening, every podcast in everywhere is all about AI and how to write a better comment. We're not going to talk about how to write a better comment. Everybody knows how to use AI for that. Beau, we were talking before the show, maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about yourself and why you're in the right position to tell us about a higher level use of AI.

Beau Brown  
Well, I'm trying to implement it in every single way that I possibly can to try and save myself time and money, but I've also tried a bunch of different ways that kind of failed and didn't work, or I thought we're going to, you know, ended up costing me money in the long run. But there are a lot of really cool things beyond, just write a discrepancy, that inspectors could be using this new technology to do work for them. Great example would be like training software you can, you can put together a training software that you can train all of your guys and get some standardized training put into your company. And it's really, really easy to produce that stuff now, as long as you're willing to review what the AI is producing for you.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, so you told me about a couple of things, the training was one, you had talked about working up systems for calls, answering, and even just making your email systems better. The other day, I was thinking, personally, you know, checking in with people, kind of a lengthy part of my day, you know, using AI to say, okay, here's what I would like you to do, depending on the answer. You know, alert me. Like, if it seems like a good email back, like, I message a guy, how's things going? Good. Okay, I don't need to know. You know, hey, man, I'm running into some trouble. Now you let me know. Maybe shoot me an email or create an alert or something like that.

Beau Brown  
Yeah, you can create a bot now that'll look at your emails, read and review them, and then you can give it instructions on like, well, if the email is about an appointment and they need to move the appointment, that should be escalated to me, and you'll get a notification saying, hey, there's an email that I'm not going to respond to automatically because you've given me parameters on this, or you can downsize it to like, you know, anything that's hey, I really appreciate that you did this for me. Have a good day. You know, I need an automatic thanks, I really appreciate it, back response and to take care of it and close things out. You don't have to escalate that to me, those are problems that I don't have to worry about. You can automate all of that using AI with a bunch of different AI systems. It all depends on, like, what level of automation you want to go to. I was, you know, earlier, telling you, I'm trying to do an AI receptionist. I want to get it to the point where somebody can call me and get basic questions about my company answered, you know, what are my prices? When's my availability? And then they can, you know, get those real basic things, what services do I offer? And I'm trying to set it up so that the very beginning, it notifies people that it's an AI receptionist, and then if you need to escalate to a real person, it'll do that for you, but I'm not currently available, which is why you got the AI.

Ian Robertson  
Okay, so let's dig into that then, Beau. So you're talking about using it at a higher level. I think most inspectors use AI to some degree. We'll ask it questions, have it look up a, you know, a code reference or something like that.

Beau Brown  
It gets those confidently wrong.

Ian Robertson  
Man, if I had a dime for every time AI was just so completely wrong, you know. Well, let me ask you this, what is the most wrong AI out there that you have found?

Beau Brown  
GPT.

Ian Robertson  
Oh, my right. Okay, yeah. ChatGPT.

Beau Brown  
Yes. GPT is most likely to hallucinate, most likely to give you a confidently wrong answer and then try to back it up like, nah, look, here's how I got this information, and then hallucinate those answers. It gets really crazy in GPT, so I would say that's the most likely.

Ian Robertson  
So I think that's probably the most common one that most home inspectors use. If I get one more email that is copy and pasted out of ChatGPT, that gives me completely wrong...

Beau Brown  
The little dashes of...

Ian Robertson  
Oh my goodness.

Beau Brown  
Oh, I see those things, I want to kill somebody, like, ugh.

Ian Robertson  
Well, okay, Beau. So, I had a client. He said, here is 15 things that AI says is wrong with my website. He didn't say AI. It says Ian, I found this many things that are wrong with my website. I got down to number eight, and I'm like, not one of them has been accurate, not even a little bit. So I'm like, this looks like ChatGPT. So first of all, I can't see the last seven points and the first eight points are wrong. And I gave them the examples, and I gave them screenshots, and they're like, well, that just helped me decide which AI not to use.

Beau Brown  
Yeah, and it seems like most of the AIs are kind of prone to that. It seems like any AI that you pick, you can run into the mistake of deciding that it's the wrong one, just because there's so many other changing and moving around with the politics and all that stuff, it gets really complicated. What I think would be beneficial for most home inspectors to try and focus on is whatever process you produce with AI, I just recently discovered this myself, you need to make sure you can replicate on a different AI later, because it might go away, it might change, it might not be a viable option anymore. And so you do need to be future thinking about those sort of things, I would say is another piece of recommendation, if you're going to be trying to go up to a higher level with this stuff. If I built a receptionist and then the software collapses or isn't available anymore, or something like that, you need to have a backup.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, because there are actually several large, I'd say large, well known, AI companies that just won't be here at some point. There's a couple of them right now.

Beau Brown  
Somebody's going to lose.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, people are going to lose. And if you have all your eggs in one basket, we're taking a really big chance. So the problem with AI is easy to build stuff, easy to make things happen. But now they're like, here's a pile of code. You need to host this somewhere else. And you're like, I mean, I just have a bunch of numbers and dashes. What do I do? So you have to learn which one is likely to win the race and being able to replicate that, as you said. So besides the one that we should probably avoid the most. I still use ChatGPT. I use it conversationally, personally for my everyday stuff, recipes looking up. You know, what happens if a zebra doesn't have stripes on it? Or, I don't know. I'm going to be using ChatGPT for conversational stuff, and I'm going to be using Gemini for just basic information look up. But when it comes to higher level stuff. We actually use AI that we pay 1000s and 1000s of dollars for, because I want something that's reliable and powerful. So you mentioned a higher level of using AI as building an answering service. So maybe start there, if you could, Beau, I'd like to hear about how you would implement that with AI.

Beau Brown  
So basically what I did is I started in GPT, is where I started, and I was asking it what was possible and what wasn't possible with AI and where I would need to go to start figuring out what steps I could do to create software that could basically link these things together. I knew that there was a software out there that can talk to people really, really human like and record information from that conversation. I knew there was a software out there that could look at my calendar and organize priorities in my calendar based off of like, what my level of priority that I want for these different time schedules are, and then there would be a way to take when that person talking AI, talked to somebody, looked at the calendar, saw the available dates, would also know, you know, have a little bit of a brain, has to know about my company, so I could train it on exactly how I want it to respond to people exactly when I want it to ask questions and what level of questions I wanted to ask. It wasn't a small task. It took days and days and days of calling it and talking to it and going, I hate the way that worked. I hated the flow there. I would have hung up on this. And eventually I got to something that I was like, oh, if I were to call anybody, okay, this is pretty quick and easy to deal with, and if I didn't want to deal with it, it'd be easy to get to the guy that's on the other end, and I probably wouldn't totally hate it. And it was basically just mixing three different pieces of AI together, one that talks, one that looks at my Google Calendar, and then one that connects to my scheduling software and schedules for me, and those are API's. And so I just asked an AI software to build these API's, to connect already existing software to each other and build out a flow network that ended up producing an end product for me, which was, somebody could call a phone number that was on my website, get an AI receptionist and get it scheduled. The problem that I'm having right now is my scheduling software doesn't connect with an API, and I'd have to do it. Anyways, getting into complex programming talk, and that's the problem we're currently at. I'm waiting for my scheduling software to catch up. They say they are, they're going to catch up and will be able to connect things together. So I built it before even my scheduling software was ready for it. But it is doable. It works really, really good. I've had other inspectors call it and talk to it and I've gotten some pushback. Some inspectors say, you know, I just don't know if I want to trust this AI thing, but that's one of the biggest time sinks in my life right now. I'm still answering my own phones because I just couldn't get anybody that was answering them the way I wanted them answered. And now I'm looking at AI as an option, seeing if it'll work. And I think I think I'm getting pretty close to it.

Ian Robertson  
That's awesome. And there's a couple of points in there that I wanted to talk about. One of the things that you mentioned was it took days to get it even close to where you wanted it. I think part of the problem is it's kind of like if somebody makes a cake wrong, like you get a box cake, you put it together and you forget an egg or you don't put enough frosting on it, or it tastes weird. People don't blame the baker. They blame the box cake. And they're like, that box cake, every time I've had it, is gross. People tend to say, every time I've used AI, it's AI slop.

Beau Brown  
Oh, I could talk to you about this forever.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, AI will only produce what we make. And the problem is we all like to sit down and all of a sudden we're Hugh Jackman in that movie from 30 years ago, sitting at a computer and things are happening, and all of a sudden we're website developers and we're app developers, and we're amazing, and then we walk away, and really, we kind of have a turd. It's AI slopp, we're impressed with ourselves, but it's ai slop, so somebody objectively speaking, goes, it's kind of a turd. I hate AI stuff.

Beau Brown  
Yes. So the problem here is like, it's even parallel with art and AI that's doing art. What's going on is that your ability to go from idea to reality is such a short margin now that all of the learning, the little things that makes it into a good reality, never happen. And so I can absolutely make an app in 30 minutes. Is it a good app? No freaking way. I could absolutely get AI to respond to every single one of my emails. Am I going to lose clients if it's just bombarding them with AI response drivel, yes, you need to get in there and adjust whatever the lever is inside of whatever software you're using to say, this is exactly how I want you to respond. Think carefully about it. Get it to spit that information back out to you. Look at it and go, I don't personally like that, and rework it. Same thing with building a website, building any sort of AI process. And there's a lot of guys that like, I have a big social media page, lot of guys that lean on AI to do social media stuff, and they're like, I don't know why but some people use AI, and it just does so great in social media. And mine doesn't, it sucks, like, I put it up, and everybody's like, oh, this is AI slop. And the answer is, it's because your journey from idea to reality was so short that you never got to, like, do any of the little improvements in there to make the reality awesome. And you should have, still, you know, got the end product, looked at it, and gone. I could tweak this because you can. It's easy to do the tweaks now with AI, too. Why not? Why not tweak it? And people get frustrated working with AI. It's not because AI is stupid. It's because you don't understand how to use the tool. You just got to learn how to talk to it, and it'll get easier.

Ian Robertson  
And that's the thing. It's a tool. It reminds me of years ago, this old carpenter told me about when they came out with nail guns. Everybody under the sun thought they were a carpenter then. They can throw up a wall in a couple of minutes. I'm a framer. You know what that did to the quality of work. It was garbage, and it was garbage for a long period of time, and still kind of is not at the level it used to be, because before you had to have all those little steps in between, before you got the nail into the wood. Now you're just like, throw that board up and hit it with a nail gun. AI is the nail gun. We were like, cool. I can make a image that five years ago would have taken me two days and an actual designer to make great but it's slop. Nobody cares anymore. You didn't put care into it.

Beau Brown  
You never had the designer look at it and think about it critically and go, oh, this just just doesn't work here. And then fix those little parts. The slop are the little details that nobody looks at. You looked at my website and were like, hey, like, your menus moving around and all that stuff. And I was sitting here going, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's, it's crap, man, because I got to sit down and spend literally hours reiterating and tweaking and bugging and tweaking, and I don't like the way that looks and changing to get it to something that I think is going to be great, and it will be when I'm done, but it's an unfinished product, and if I were to quit here, I have a website up. People can schedule. I could, but it's not gonna, it's not gonna do as good for me.

Ian Robertson  
Well, first of all, your website's not crap. It's very nice, but...

Beau Brown  
It just has some of the AI flaws.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, but I think therein lies the point is, good enough. I think too many of us say this is good enough. It built me a website. Whenever a client comes to me and they're like, oh, man, I want my website to look like this one that you designed. I'm like, then give me a logo that looks like that. Because we built the website around the logo. Here's how the design looks. It's a whole thing. When people just say, I have a logo, I have a website, it's just like, I have a baseball bat. I'm not Joe DiMaggio, you know, there has to be something more than that. We have to feel amazing. Like, when we look at it, do we feel good? We're like, oh, man, this kicks some serious butt. Cool. If we feel that way, likely somebody else looking at it does too. Same thing with your use of it for answering phone calls. Before we started, I even said I might give you a little pushback on that point, and here's the reason why. So much AI answering is absolute garbage, to the point where statistically speaking, you lose more phone calls. So it only works, typically, for people who are at volume. So if you're Amazon, cool, you have AI answering all day long, because you're the guy. If you lose 10%, doesn't matter, you made more money by not answering those 10% of phone calls, not that people are calling Amazon. You get what I'm saying. If you're a big home inspection company and you have 10, 20 inspectors, or even just a few, and you're answering more calls than you can handle, cool, that's going to save you time and money. If you're a struggling inspector doing 10 inspections a month, every phone call is going to matter. So losing two, three phone calls to AI is a big deal, but most of it is garbage. You have no idea how many times I've had a home inspector say, Ian, can you call my company? And I will genuinely try. I'll put myself in the mindset, okay, I'm looking for a home inspector 30 seconds in, I'm just like, you lost me 20 seconds ago, you know. So how do you get around that?

Beau Brown  
It says right at the beginning. So, like, first of all, I paid extra and spent a bunch of time finding one that sounded like a real person, to the point where it offended people, because it would start talking to them, and then they would figure out, like, after a little while, oh, it's AI. And then they were angry that it was lying to them, because it had, it never announced that it was AI, and it was that accurate and so I was like, okay, well, then the problem here is, like, I don't want to erode trust with my company. I would hate for that to happen, because I'm trying to save myself some time. So I got it to announce at the beginning. Basically it answers the phone and it says, hello, thank you for calling C&H Inspections. Before we go any further here, I want you to know that I'm an AI receptionist. Beau is a little busy right now, so he couldn't answer the phone, but if you'd like, I can send him a message, and he will reach out to you the second he is available. But in the meantime, I can answer questions about when we're available, what the price of an inspection is, what our services are. How can I help you? And the person on the other end usually goes, I want to talk to Beau. And he goes, all right. Can I get your phone number and email? And then they give them my phone number and email, and I get a message saying, hey, so and so needs you to respond immediately. And if they say, no, I need to know about...and they don't even care about me yet. They just want to know more about my company because they're shopping because they're calling on a Google ad or a pay per click, something you know. They're not a hot lead. They're just looking for answers. A lot of those people are willing to go, how much is a home inspection? And then I've got them, it's talking to them. And at least we're working our way down the sales pitch. I'm working my process now, like, okay, well, if they're asking for the home inspection, tell them what the price is based off of square footage, and if they're blah, blah, blah, blah. And I've got a whole thought process thing that's worked out on it, the way it's supposed to work down the sales process. And at first it took a while, like I was saying, it was not just hey, AI. The software that I used at first had that option, where you could just put in a prompt and then it would behave based off of your prompt. That was not good enough for me. So it had logic options. Behaves based off of logic options. That is plenty good for me. If it talks like a real person and behaves off some logic options, I can teach it to sell an inspection, and it does pretty darn good. Well, I shouldn't say it does pretty darn good. Everybody that's tried it out likes it. But have I put it up against my clients yet? No, because it can't actually schedule an inspection. The other end of it's not connected yet. So everybody that's tested it likes it.

Ian Robertson  
So there's some things in there that I like that you did. You built it like a sales funnel. So a sales funnel is transparent and builds trust. Your AI said, hey, listen, I'm AI. Beau's busy. Want me to message him for you? So first of all, you were able to answer the phone call. I'm not completely sold on AI answering phones, by the way, but your flow, I think I probably like best out of any that I've seen or heard, and I've seen and heard hundreds. 

Beau Brown  
Wow.

Ian Robertson  
Maybe not hundreds. It's been a lot. It's been a lot. Identify it as AI, option to send a message, and immediately when they have any kind of irritation, okay, cool. Give me your phone number. I'll have him call you. I like that. And then there is going to always be a measure of people that are going to ask it some questions. One guy's AI, I started asking the questions. I'm like, can there be a dinosaur at the inspection? If there is a dinosaur, would you protect me? How far would you go to protect me, you know? And he was reading the transcript. He's like, dude, I just wanted you to ask a question about a crack in the foundation. Hey, you never know.

Beau Brown  
Yeah, no, when I put mine together, I called another inspector that I respect a lot, and I was like, break it. Ask the stupidest questions ever. And he did. He broke it so many times.

Ian Robertson  
That's awesome. So the other thing you mentioned was training. And that one intrigued me, because that one really, really is hard. Training new inspectors is a huge pain in the butt, a giant time suck. And let's be honest, there's a percentage that just don't make it. So it almost doubles your time suck, because it's like, half the guys make it. Half of the guys leave after whatever period of time, you know. So how would you use AI at a higher level to do training? I haven't done this, and I haven't looked into it, so I'm interested.

Beau Brown  
So you probably got a bunch of material that you use for training already, probably some manuals or something like that. If you've got a bunch of guys, there's got to be some sort of procedure, I'm hoping and you can take all of that information, and if it's not already digitized, digitize it, give it to an AI, and say, hey, I need to build a training program around this. And then go one step further. This is more again, like I said, this isn't just build me a training program, because what you're going to get at the end of this is absolute crap, right? What you would want to do then is to tell it like, hey, use current education methods. I want to improve this training that I'm currently doing, and then what would be the best medium in which to share this and then build out on that medium using AI. But again, every step of the way, whatever it produces, you're going to have to read through and look at, but when you're done with it, you'll have a product that you could automate and give to a guy and have them come out the other side. A great would be like, hey, I've pulled 50 photos from inspections that I've done over the last month. I put them into AI and said, these 50 photos need to be turned into a quiz that I can send off to my inspector while he's at home studying and be like, hey, every day, you need to answer 10 of these quizzes. There's five photos in each quiz. You need to put the right annotations in there and the right discrepancies in for this photo. And then it's going to email me back when you're done with the quiz, and I'm going to send you back an email with my critique like, I think that this is something that you need to change in the way we do annotations and stuff like that. It's not quite procedural and well, you know, it's just not how things flow. That's a small one, right? But at a bigger one, you could build a whole training program that does that all automatically for you, and it just depends on what depth, how far do you want to go with this? Do you want to make like a program like InterNACHI or AHIT, or any of the guys out there that have those programs independently yourself for your company, or is it just to tighten up the way your inspectors work procedurally? And you're sending out an email once a month to all of your inspectors that says, hey, just a reminder, this is the verbiage that we're sticking to on our discrepancies. I see a couple of us are drifting on it, and it's all done by AI because it went through and looked at a few of the discrepancies, because you gave it to them, like a bunch of reports. You gave it to AI and said, hey, this week, I need you to review these reports and make sure that all my inspectors verbiage is correct. If you notice anybody that's not aligned with the verbiage, create an email that says, hey, we're falling outside of our verbiage, or whatever it is for our specific training, and send it off to make sure that everybody's staying current together, and that we're all doing the same thing, and that everybody looks the same. At least that's important in my company. I want all my guys to look and sound like me. We're all robots of Beau doing an inspection together.

Ian Robertson  
I really like a couple of things that you said. I like everything you said, but I like a couple things, especially, the one about reviewing reports for training. So, like a lot of companies will have like a Monday or a Tuesday meeting or monthly meeting or whatever, you could just dump in last week's reports and even have AI just dump out with, okay, here's our general guidelines, here's our training manual. Here's our SOP for our state, and here's, as a template, the owners reports. Here's where everybody's deviated. And do it by person like, hey, you know, you had five water heaters that were orphaned, but you didn't mention them as being orphaned. So what's going on? Then that way, it kind of gets your guys to clean things up a little bit, or it was an orphaned water heater. But you didn't explain what a orphaned water heater was, that kind of thing.

Beau Brown  
Yeah, at a higher level, this stuff will save you a ton of time, if you're willing to just think about it that way.

Ian Robertson  
So now let me ask you, though, which AI model would you use for that? And going back to what we talked about earlier. There's a lot of really garbage ones out there, and there's a lot of them that aren't going to be around probably for a while, and there's going to be a few big winners. So if you were going to do that today, like right after our podcast, you're going to go build a training program. Which one would you probably go to?

Beau Brown  
Claude is probably one of the places that I would go to. And I don't know if this is like, the correct verbiage for it, because there's so much being thrown around with these, but I like a basic LLM, something that will just talk to me and we can work through ideas first before I ideate on trying to do something with AI. I talked to AI about like, is this possible? Is it within the realm of like reality of because here's a very specific idea of what I want to accomplish. Could it do that, or are there restrictions currently? Is it even possible? And then if it is possible, what software is available that isn't you, or would you be available to do this that fits the parameters of what I'm working with? And then it'll help guide me make a decision. And then from there, you can decide on the politics and everything, because there's 10 different options for everything that you want to do. And of course, there's going to be some winners and some losers. Like this would again harken back to my recent solution of, you got to have a backup. Pick two of them, make sure you know how to do it on two of them, and so that if one of them crashes or goes away, you can replace the process on another one, or try to figure out how to remove the process from the AI and automate it using an API, which is a whole thing we could go down later, but it's something that you could, it would add a safety net there, remove some automation.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, and I agree, and there are quite a few out there. Even like GitHub has their own co pilot for writing code and things like that. If I were doing exactly what you said, I would have picked Claude too. Claude is probably, if you're going to write software, I think Claude is probably the best bet. And of the higher level. It's a little bit more conversational, which I do like, we all like to say, well, I don't need it to have a conversation with me. I need it to do a task. But there is a huge amount of value to how our brains work as human beings, compared to AI. I don't need it to just do a task. I need it to give me pushback. You told me to do this, but there's three ways to do it. One is going to save you resources over time, but the other one's going to get it done quicker. And there's one in the middle. Oh, well, I didn't think about that. Claude tends to push back. There was a term that you used though earlier, called hallucinations, just so everybody knows what those are. What's an AI hallucination?

Beau Brown  
This is where it's just kind of making things up to, like, satisfy your needs. You ask it something, and it's pulling down information that's obviously not right, is completely in the realm of incorrect or whatever, but does a really good job of, like, trying to make it sound like it fits the situation. Because it's guessing that this is the thing that will give you the answer. Like hallucinations boil down to the way AI functions. Everybody thinks that AI is like a person, and it's thinking. AI is just predicting the most likely next word. It's a computer program that's really, really good at that, so good, in fact, that we think it's anthropic, like it's alive. It's really a thing. It's not. It's just ones and zeros that are predicting the next word. And we've gotten really good at making those ones and zeros do their job. So it's going to sometimes predict, especially if it's programmed specifically like GPT to make you feel good about using it and make you like, oh yeah, it gets me. It understands me. It's going to predict an answer that's going to make you feel good that's completely wrong, and that means you're way likely to read into it and believe it, it's hallucinating those answers. It's just the prediction model was wrong. And they didn't get the correct information. So it all boils down on how AI functions.

Ian Robertson  
And they all hallucinate.

Beau Brown  
Yes, they all do.

Ian Robertson  
And one of the most expensive ones out there that we use, it hallucinated on me so badly I was asking it questions about itself, about can I host this particular function right with you? Or should I go to GitHub, or should I project it through Cloudflare or whatever? And I said, no, you can't do it through us. And it just kept repeating it. And then finally, I contacted support, and they're like, no, that must be a hallucination. It's wrong. And I'm like, you paid 1000s of dollars for that, and it's pulling stuff out of its ear. You know, it's like all right. So what other, besides the obvious hallucinations and remember, a great tool doesn't mean no effort, I think, is kind of the summation of what we're trying to get at. You have to still put effort into anything that you make with it to have it not be AI slop.

Beau Brown  
You can drive a screw with a drill. Doesn't mean that you can build a good shed.

Ian Robertson  
Exactly. So, what other high level projects do you think home inspectors should consider? You know, beyond the, this is how I wrote about hydrostatic pressure in my report.

Beau Brown  
You could build an app. I mean, we ran into the problem where it was hard to find code answers that we wanted, and it was because if you ask GPT, or almost any AI about it, it's trained like its brain is trained on the internet, and the internet is a conglomeration of people's opinions on the code.

Ian Robertson  
The internet is never wrong, man. Come on.

Beau Brown  
Never. So I wanted a way to be able to look up code and know that the brain that I was getting the code from only knew the code.

Ian Robertson  
You're talking about building code, right?

Beau Brown  
Yep. Building code, exactly. Building code, residential. So the IRC and the NPC. And you can do that. You could make an app that you can train its brain on just one thing. You can make your own AI with AI that will do tasks for you. We talked a little bit about email automation, right? You can do CRM with AI beyond just the answering the phone calls, you can send out drip feed emails and then use the AI to analyze how people are reacting to those emails and then create new ones based off of that, those analytics. And it wouldn't do a good job at that unless you reviewed what it was creating and then changed it and tweaked it a little bit before it sent things out. But at least it would put you on the right road and make the work level that you had to do on that particular marketing campaign less. You know, we've said it as a theme here over and over. But again, if you're going to utilize AI to do any sort of task for you, there's got to be over vision and making sure that you tweak it and get it to fit. So that it looks like a human's been monitoring it, it doesn't look like AI slop.

Ian Robertson  
Yeah. And you know, you mentioned even before the podcast, and you mentioned it just now. I think everybody and their brother has come out with home inspection software over the past six months. I have never seen this many new software come on. And listen, if you're out there building software, more power to you. Just like anything else, there's a lot to it. How do you support the app? If there's a bug, how do you fix the bug? Do you have a testing environment, a beta environment, and then a production environment? Do you use a CDN? What do you do for photo storage? What happens if the app topples over because of data reservation on a specific device? There's so much to consider besides just saying, hey, I built an app that does these 100 things.

Beau Brown  
It's such a hill to climb, right. So I started the the app that we built with a partner two years ago, right? And it was not the small, tiny tasks that we originally had anticipated, but we wanted it so bad that we kept trying. But that's what it takes. It takes time and tweaking and backing up, it removes the barrier. You don't need a programmer to build an app anymore. You still need knowledge about programming to build a good app. You can buy the tools to frame a house. You still need the knowledge of framing to put the wood together in the right way. So we've just made digital creation easier. I'm going to start saying this now. AI is the power tool of digital world. Yeah, basically we made the digital world, we gave everybody a power tool, and now everybody's running around with power tools cutting themselves and going, oh, what?

Ian Robertson  
Yeah, that's exactly it. You know, I'll give one example from the software world. So there's a particular device out there. It's probably the second most ubiquitous device out there, and it has a memory conservation feature to it. And so if you have an app, it'll close down multiple connections. So if your app is built, just like AI would build it, it would say, okay, we're going to need 15 connections to upload multiple photos, to download comments, make sure you sync with the cloud, yada yada yada. But now 1/3 of all users, their device is going to close down your app, and you're not going to know why. 1/3 of users are just going to be having their app collapse, and you're not going to know why. And then when they call you for support, do you have a support team? It's 10 o'clock at night, some dudes like, this had to go out two hours ago. I spent four hours on this, and you're telling me that you don't have a support person there to give me a hand. You know, there's more to it, but I think the way you said it was best, the barrier is gone, doesn't mean we're going to do a good job with it. We still need to know how the house gets put together. So listen, Beau, we could talk all day. I'm going to pre-invite you back if you're willing to talk about some more subjects on this, because you seem very knowledgeable on it, and you're a little bit more involved and technically adept than probably a lot of us are. So I'd like to pre-invite you back to talk about some of these other AI subjects coming up. Would that be okay?

Beau Brown  
Yeah, I gotta ask you one thing, though, if you're gonna invite me back, you gotta invite me back with my guru, Carl. Like, if you think I'm smart about this stuff, Carl makes me look like an idiot. He really knows it. So I'd love to bring him on, because him and I are great about this stuff. I'm just the guy that's out there running around trying to tell their inspectors how great it is. He actually figured it all out.

Ian Robertson  
Nice. Well, I'd love to have Carl on the show then. We'll have a three person session here, and we'll get it done. Thank you so much for being on, Beau.

Beau Brown  
Happy to be here. Thanks.

Ian Robertson  
Thank you.

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